Cake

May 05, 2009

A couple of weeks ago, I signed up for a cake decorating class at the famous French Culinary Institute in New York. Every Saturday (for 5 weeks) we get trained for five hours on making a great cake (and lots of chocolate buttercream of course). The teacher, Chef Cynthia, has her own cake decorating business and from looking at her website, she is quite good at it too.

Although it's difficult for me to adapt to the classroom situation again (with the apparently prerequisite teacher's pets, suck-ups and being treated like a kid), I'm really enjoying the tips and tricks of how to make these beautiful cakes. Even though the demos are quite long, we do get a lot of time to try everything out ourselves. And being in the Institute means that we have all the professional equipment (and funny outfits) we need to do the baking, mixing, whisking etc. (that does require some creative thinking when doing it at home...)

Cake decorating is pretty much without limits. The more tools you have, the crazier you can go. That's why I love the guys from the TV show Ace of Cakes, where they really make every cake into something special.

The goal in my class is to make a 3-tier cake by the end of the 25 hours, fully decorated. The first tier is real cake, the 2 other tiers are dummies, but decorated with fondant and icing. Our designs were due last week and although most of my classmates went for the traditional piping and flowers, I decided to make a birthday cake for Mike. And let's just say he is not the flowers kind of guy. So, my influence for the design was his love for drumming and hard core metal music... Below the design and in two weeks I'll show you what the end result looks like!